Singapore’s travel tech space heats up

Yeoh Siew Hoon runs Singapore’s major annual travel tech conference, Web In Travel. She’s also an experience journalist covering the travel space, having reported for several trade titles, and publishes the active WIT blog. Plus, she’s curating our session on travel tech at Echelon 2011 in the ‘Breaking the Echo Chamber’ track, which is all about exploring new verticals that web and mobile folks might be overlooking.

Yeoh thinks Singapore’s travel tech space is showing signs of serious activity. Young professionals in the travel business are leaving cushy jobs with multinational to create travel tech startups. Here are some excerpts from Yeoh’s latest opinion piece on what she thinks is a growing trend.

At WIT*e last week, at least two young executives took me away from my beer and chicken wings to pitch their ideas to me. One had an idea that would use Facebook and social sharing and another had a meta-search angle.

Both, in their mid-20s, were working for major corporations and were looking to strike out.

In Australia, I know of two other industry peers who are working on their start-ups with both due to be launched soon. One is in the deals sector (someone at the HSMAI breakfast yesterday said, ‘they are popping up like mushrooms’) and the other, a meta-search model.

In India, someone I know is also working under the radar right now to launch his own start-up after years of working in major corporations.

And what are the hot areas in travel tech? Gambling, deals, metasearch, content aggregation, user experience and mobile, according to Brett Henry, a VP of marketing and India at Abacus International. Henry goes into detail on each area in this post at WIT. Henry will also be a panelist at Echelon 2011.

[Image from WIT]

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